A small public service before we start: this is Manet, with an ‘a’, Édouard Manet, and not Claude Monet, with an ‘o’. The two are forever muddled, and I will come back …

Regent’s Park in London covers 410 acres of what was once a royal hunting ground. Henry VIII took the land at the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s and kept it …

The National Gallery in London turned two hundred in 2025, and to mark it the whole collection was rehung and a few new works came in. One of them is this pastel …

I love The King’s Speech. I have gone back to it more than once, for the plot, for the cast, and above all for Colin Firth as George VI, the performance that …

Before I had ever been anywhere, I knew Venice from paintings. Gold light on green water, gondolas tipped like commas across a canal, a city that looked too lovely to be a …

Queen Victoria was born at Kensington Palace on 24 May 1819 and lived there, under a strict and closely watched upbringing, until the June morning in 1837 when she was woken to …